Last year, Nick Cave and his band, the Bad Seeds, embarked on one of the most emotional tours of his career, supporting an album recorded in the aftermath of the death of one of his sons. Now he’s releasing a film, Distant Sky, of a concert the band played in Copenhagen as a one-night only screening in movie theaters around the world.
The screening will take place April 12th. David Barnard, whose credits include films and documentaries about Radiohead, Björk, Alice Cooper and the Spice Girls, directed the film. Ticketing information is available on Nick Cave’s website.
At the Copenhagen concert, the band played a career-spanning set list that went back to the title track of their first album, 1984’s From Her to Eternity. Though the majority of the set focused on the moving 2016 album, Skeleton Tree, which Cave & Co. recorded in the wake of his personal tragedy. The subsequent tour was one of the most powerful and touching of his career, as he connected with audiences, even holding hands with some people in the front row. The poster for the film shows Cave holding a towel to his face as if he were weeping.
At the time of Skeleton Tree’s release, Cave declined to do interviews, opting instead to release a documentary film, One More Time With Feeling, which showed fans how he was coping with the loss at home along with footage of the group recording the album. “It wasn’t conceived as a work of entertainment,” director Andrew Dominik told Rolling Stone in 2016. “It was a practical solution to a practical problem. I think there may be a certain voyeuristic interest in what happened to him. But I think his fans are very much interested in how he and his family are doing, and that’s the subject of the film: How they are.”
Cave completed the Skeleton Tree tour late last year with a pair of performances in Tel Aviv, Israel, after facing criticism from Roger Waters and Brian Eno who support a cultural boycott of the country, claiming it supports apartheid with regard to Palestine. “At the end of the day there are two reasons why I am here,” Cave said at a press conference about his decision to play Israel. “One is that I love Israel and I love Israeli people and two is to make a principled stand against anyone who wants to censor and silence musicians. So really you could say in a way that the [boycott] made me play Israel.”
